Study: Social games will make $5.6 billion outside Facebook by 2014

Maybe there's a future for social games beyond Facebook, after all. That is, of course, if you ask the right people. A study by SuperData Research and commissioned by Viximo, a leading social games platform, estimates that social games that exist outside of Facebook's grubby paws will reel in a whopping $5.6 billion in revenue by 2014. Non-Facebook social games are expected to reach $3.2 billion in revenue this year alone.

While it's important to keep in mind just who commissioned this study, we should at least consider that social games do exist on other platforms around the globe. In fact, the study reports to have found that Asia is the largest market for social games, and that Facebook accounts for a third of all social network traffic around the world. The SuperData study made these estimations based on 774,158 unique transactions by 152,159 individuals in the six-month period ending on June 1, 2011.

From that, the study found that the largest western nations for social gaming aren't even in North America, but are Russia and Brazil with 35 million and 32.6 million players, respectively. "The social web beyond Facebook is often overlooked when it comes to games and applications," Viximo CEO Dale Strang said in a release. As it turns out, social networks beyond Facebook represent a non-trivial--in fact, significant--and fertile ground for games and apps."

With global competitors like Google+, the Mobage network and whatever in the world Gree is cooking up with OpenFeint, Strang certainly has a point. And let's not forget the number of developers and publisher across the globe that are quickly gaining notoriety like wooga, Nordeus and Spil Games. Facebook, it looks like you're surrounded.

Do you think Facebook will become less important for social game creators as competitors rise? How do you think Facebook will adapt to the growing competition? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.